A History of Hungarian Literature/Chapter 2
II
THE HUNGARIAN LANGUAGE
In studying a literature it is necessary to give some consideration to the language in which it is written.
At a first glance, Hungarian seems as much a stranger among all the other European languages, as the erratic blocks of the geologist amidst their foreign surroundings. It is not related to the language of any neighbouring nation, either Russian, German, or Wallachian. It is true we may find in it fragments from all these; the Hungarian word harcz (battle), for instance, is identical with the German Hatz; fogoly with Vogel. There are numerous Slavish words—király (king)—kral; and Latin ones as well—muzsika—musica. All these, however, are evidently borrowed words.
The origin of Hungarian has often been discussed by philologists; some thought it was derived from Hebrew; others that it was of Slavish origin; while some regarded it as an ancient speech having no relatives among modern tongues.
In the eighteenth century, however, an incident occurred which suddenly threw a ray of light upon the subject. In 1769 a Hungarian astronomer, a Jesuit, John Sajnovics, went to the north of Europe to observe the Transit of Venus. At Vardö, on the extreme north coast of Norway, he saw a great deal of the Laplanders and it struck him how very similar their language was to his own. That discovery outweighed in importance all his astronomical investigations and he published a book maintaining the common origin of the two languages. (Demonstratio Idioma Ungarorum et Lapponum idem esse.) The work proved the origin of the Hungarian language, for it was well known that the Lapp idiom was akin to the Finnish, and to that of several of the small tribes living in the northern parts of Russia.
It had long been known in Hungary that there were a few scattered tribes related by race to the Hungarians, dwelling far away in north-eastern Russia. In the thirteenth century, Julian, an enthusiastic Franciscan monk, was told that a Hungarian tribe, the Baskirs, was still living somewhere on the frontier between Europe and Asia, and practising the old pagan religion. Julian at once resolved to go to these Asiatic kinsmen of his and convert them to Christianity. He accordingly went, and discovered them on the banks of the river Kama, and they understood his speech.
Towards the end of the fifteenth century, King Matthias Corvinus also heard, from travelling merchants, that far away in the east there were some tribes related to the Hungarians. He intended to open communication with them, but he died before effecting his purpose. Two hundred years later, Martin Fogel, a learned Hamburg physician, on reading the first Hungarian grammar, became convinced of the relation between Hungarian and Finnish, and wrote a book on the subject which served as a foundation for the theory of Leibniz concerning the kinship of the Hungarians, Finns, and Laplanders.
Sajnovics, the Jesuit, detected a similarity not only between words but also between grammatical rules. We know now the names of several more related tribes living in northern and central Russia. There are the Ostyák, the Mordvinian, Cheremisz, Votyák, and Zürjén. There must have been a time when all those tribes lived in one land in common with the Hungarians, and spoke one common language. One of the proofs given by Sajnovics is that the similarity occurs in the most familiar words used in primitive life, such as numerals, names of parts of the body, pronouns, water, fire, sun, moon, wood, names of animals. Another proof is furnished by likeness in grammatical structure. Hungarian is a language of affixes. Many varieties of meaning which other nations express by means of prepositions with the article, or by various separate words, are expressed in Hungarian by a letter or syllable, either simply added on at the end of a word or fused with it. The Hungarian equivalent of the three words "I see thee," is "Látlak." "For my father," is "atyámért," the last syllable of which is composed of the affixes m—my, and ért—for.
According to the evidence of the oldest written fragment, a funeral speech (1200 A.D.), those affixes were originally separate substantives, which were merely placed beside the principal word, as though, for instance, instead of saying "within the house," we were to say "house, interior."
Another feature which distinguishes Hungarian from all the Indo-Germanic languages, but which we find in the language of the Ugrian tribes, is the assimilating of the vowel in the affix to that in the stem of a word. Just as in music the notes in a chord have to be in harmony with one another, so in a Hungarian word. If the stem contains the vowel, o, u, or a (the latter being pronounced like o in hot) the affix must contain a sound of the same kind. Not only are the words similar in the languages of the Ugrian race and the Hungarians, but also the grammatical rules. It is now proved that Hungarian is one of the Ugrian languages.
There are some scholars who do not accept this view of the origin of the Hungarian tongue, amongst others Arminius Vámbéry, the well-known Orientalist. His opinion is that Hungarian is derived from Turkish, and that the Ugrian elements in it are all of later date. It is true that the language contains a large number of important words, chiefly substantives, of Turkish origin, but they are borrowed words, and no more warrant our regarding Hungarian as a Turkish tongue than the considerable Romance element in English would justify us in calling it a Romance language.